Saving Seafood

Biden touts offshore wind at Philly Shipyard, opens door for turbines in Gulf of Mexico

July 23, 2023 — Metal sparks flew as crews sliced into massive plates during a steel-cutting ceremony at South Philadelphia’s shipyard on Thursday morning.

It marks the start of construction of a new vessel – Acadia – that will ferry rock from quarries to the ocean floor as part of construction on hundreds of new offshore wind turbines.

President Joe Biden visited Philly Shipyard to tout the growth of the offshore wind industry in the region and to announce the first lease sale in the waters off of the Gulf of Mexico.

“Our investing in America agenda is bringing our clean energy supply chains home,” Biden told the crowd of union workers and supporters. “Across the Delaware River in Paulsboro, New Jersey, workers are rolling the steel foundation for another large-scale wind project.”

The monopiles, which are the large poles that support the turbines, are being built at the Port of Paulsboro. New Jersey is also building a 200-acre wind port near the Hope Creek nuclear power plant in Salem County. The wind port and Paulsboro hub are expected to create 2,500 jobs.

Read the full article at WHYY

The Fishadelphia Story

January 10, 2023 — Sometime in the 1970s, once a week every week, along the narrow streets in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a fish truck came around. It came to neighborhoods of North and West Philly, their brick row houses one room wide, set tight against each other right along the sidewalks; some houses with a little grass and trees, some with concrete; some with porches, some just with steps on which people can sit and talk.

The fish truck stayed gone, but in the Philly neighborhoods, the fresh fish came back. An outfit called Fishadelphia buys fish from the New Jersey docks, then drives it to a high school in North Philly where it’s packed into coolers, which people take home to their own porches, where neighbors pick up their assigned fish. Fishadelphia’s founder and executive director is Talia Young, whose PhD is in ecology, who’s a visiting assistant professor in environmental studies at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and whose goal in life has never been to sell fish.

“I’m sort of a scientist,” she says. “I’m not doing science but I can. I’m an academic by default, I’m a teacher for sure, I’m sort of an activist, and technically I’m a business person but I know nothing about it.”

So why is she selling fish? “I’ve spent my professional life figuring out how to occupy a space that includes the environment, science, and social justice,” Young says. Scientists don’t usually combine science with activism, worrying that the combination would undermine a reputation for unbiased research. Young, however, has only ever cared about finding the nexus between her three interests and, she says, “Fishadelphia is the closest I’ve come.”

Read the full article at Hakai Magazine

PENNSYLVANIA: Order fresh catch from shore to city with student-centered Fishadelphia program

May 26, 2022 — Dr. Talia Young is an environmentalist who has spent most of her career studying fish.

She has also been a teacher for years, so when she created the program Fishadelphia as part of a fellowship, she made students part of the business.

Now she oversees the enterprise that connects communities: fisheries at the Jersey Shore and consumers in the Philly area.

Read and watch the full story at WPVI

How an Offshore Wind Farm Would Come Onshore in Ocean City, NJ

March 10, 2022 — One of the world’s largest offshore wind developers, Denmark-based Ørsted, wants to bring 1,100 megawatts of electricity onshore from a wind farm in the Atlantic Ocean using a transmission line that would run through Ocean City, New Jersey.

That is not sitting well with some people in and around the small, but well-known Jersey Shore community, where many families across the Philadelphia region visit in the summer. Look no further than Kate Winslet’s detective from “Mare of Easttown” for proof of Ocean City’s popularity.

Still, it’s becoming increasingly likely that Ørsted’s Ocean Wind 1 project about 15-20 miles off Atlantic and Cape May counties will connect to the region’s power grid with an underground transmission line that comes onshore at an Ocean City beach. It would then run through the community to a decommissioned coal power plant in nearby Upper Township.

Read the full story at NBC Philadelphia

 

High School Students Bring Seafood to Low-Income Consumers

January 6, 2022 — Based in Philadelphia, Fishadelphia is a pilot community seafood program that was awarded a Saltonstall-Kennedy (S-K) Grant in 2020. It was designed to connect low-income consumers in Northern Philadelphia with neighboring New Jersey harvesters. This project promotes improved business practices, increased market demand for U.S. commercial fish species, and keeping working waterfronts viable.

Grants are critical to the fishing industry. Traditional funding can be hard to obtain for smaller seafood programs, but that’s where the S-K program can help. These grants help bridge that gap and support projects that are outside of the mainstream lending arena.

Since 1980, the S-K Grants program has helped turn ideas into reality. In 2018, Dr. Talia Young started this project while a Smith Conservation Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University. Her goal was to connect the fishing communities with the eating communities in the city.

“This is a cool project and one that I’m happy to highlight because it supports community participation that contributes to the promotion of U.S. seafood. This provides fresh seafood to underserved communities, and increases the customer base for our working waterfronts, which aligns with the goals of the S-K grant program,” said Nicole MacDonald, Regional S-K Grant Manager at the Greater Atlantic Regional Fisheries Office.

Take a Closer Look

Fishadelphia in essence is a de facto retail fish market with students running the show. The whole idea is to make new connections by promoting, developing, and marketing local seafood to low-income people of color. The diverse team consists of middle school, high school, and college students, family, teachers, seafood harvesters, and marine biologists. The program is creative and paves the way for expansion. It serves as a model for other communities struggling to incorporate healthy seafood into their diets. It’s not surprising MacDonald thinks that this project is “cool”—because it is.

Read the full story from NOAA Fisheries

PENNSYLVANIA: Meet Philadelphia’s First “Community-Supported Fishery”

October 22, 2020 — “We need to teach Americans how to eat other kinds of fish,” says Talia Young, echoing a sentiment she heard from a guest at a local seafood conference. Young, a postdoctoral research associate in Princeton University’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and former Philadelphia public high school teacher, realized in 2018 that she might be able to connect her passion for both people and fish.

“I thought…what if we created a program that connected local harvesters to culturally diverse seafood eaters,” she says.

So Fishadelphia was born. It’s a community-based seafood program in Philadelphia, run by high-school students from Mastery Charter Thomas Campus in South Philadelphia and Simon Gratz Mastery Charter in North Philadelphia, after school. They offer locally harvested, affordable seafood to a diverse customer base through various “clubs,” that function similarly to community supported agriculture (CSA) programs — making the program Philly’s first “CSF,” or community supported fishery. The program is focused on accessibility — so customers who have kids who are students at Mastery Thomas or Simon Gratz, are eligible for food stamps or Medicaid, or are referred by another customer, can subscribe to the CSF at a discounted “community rate.”

Read the full story at Next City

PENNSYLVANIA: Fishadelphia and Philly high schoolers are making local seafood more accessible

February 19, 2020 — For some home cooks, fish can be intimidating, expensive, easy to overcook, and polarizing. That might explain why the average American consumed just 16 pounds of seafood in 2017, compared to 92 pounds of chicken and 57 pounds of beef.

But former South Philly science teacher and Princeton post-doc fellow Talia Young sees fish differently. While she has devoted much of her academic career to studying fish, fisheries, and food supply chains, she’s also a lifelong consumer of seafood; as a Chinese American kid growing up in New York City, she routinely ate jellyfish, whole fish, shrimp, and crab.

“In my experience in working-class communities,” she says, “it’s a thing that people eat even if they’re really cash-strapped.”

So Young was surprised at a 2016 fisheries conference when a fisherman stood up and said to the crowd, “‘Americans only know how to eat cod and salmon fillets, and we need to teach them how to eat other kinds of fish.’”

Read the full story at The Philadelphia Inquirer

Reminder: August 2017 Mid-Atlantic Council Meeting in Philadelphia, PA

August 4, 2017 — The following was released by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council:

Tuesday, August 8, 2017 – Thursday, August 10, 2017

The Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council will meet next week, August 8-10, 2017, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The meeting will be held at the Courtyard Philadelphia Downtown, 21 North Juniper St., Philadelphia, PA 19107, Telephone 215-496-3200.

The meeting will be broadcast live via webinar. For access to the webinar, go to http://mafmc.adobeconnect.com/august2017 and select “enter as guest”.

New York Offshore Wind Open Houses:

During the Council meeting, representatives from the New York State Energy and Research Development Authority (NYSERDA) will hold public open houses to provide fisheries stakeholders with an opportunity to learn about and provide input to the New York State Offshore Wind Master Plan.

NYSERDA representatives will be available for discussion at the following times:

  • Tuesday, August 8, 11:00am‐7:00pm
  • Wednesday, August 9, 8:00am‐7:00pm

The open houses will be held in the same hotel as the Council meeting (Courtyard Philadelphia Downtown) in the PHJ Library on the first floor.

Click here for additional information.